In Patagonia’s Backyard

Carolyn’s Wild Blue Yonder: Lonely Planet author and travel essayist Carolyn McCarthy has finished her short, beautifully written series on hiking through Patagonia. Guided by a local, she and a friend see some of the mountains’ emptiest, most secret land, and meet a grandmother enchanted with visitors, whose stories spill out of her delight.

McCarthy is one of my favorite not-yet-known travel writers, drawing her territory with places made intense through her tight, condensed language. An excerpt from this series: “We traverse a cirque counter-clockwise to the glacier, picking through the boulders. Clouds slip around us, giving flirty glimpses of high snowfields, a silver lagoon and the ribbon of a river below us. The valley (not to be named here) of dense forest bears not one human mark, no trail or clearing. It is as virgin as when it was born (though you could argue that, while glaciers recede, the world continues to be born).”